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As we began the year, we set out our strategic priorities, with a core focus on the early years, mental health and safety for children, young people and families. Our work is increasingly concerned with systems change; working with partners to challenge and disrupt the conditions, structures and power that uphold inequalities in outcomes and experiences for children and young people.
Read MoreThis year we’re doubling down to catalyse systemic change and tackle inequalities in three main areas. One key strategic priority that we are committed to focusing on is to promote children’s and young people’s health and wellbeing, using our collective knowledge, skills, and resources to navigate and better understand the role of local partnerships in making the prevention of poor health outcomes a reality.
Read MoreIn 2023, we launched the start of an incredible partnership with leading children and young people’s cancer charities Young Lives vs Cancer, Children’s Cancer and Leukaemia Group, the Ellen MacArthur Cancer Trust and Teenage Cancer Trust, to apply an Integrated Approach to research and systems change with children and young people with cancer experience.
Read MoreIn 2024, you’ll hear less about the ‘how’ and a lot more about the ‘why’. As a team, we’ll be steadfast and focused on tackling inequalities in the outcomes and experiences of children and young people and doing so via equitable approaches to advancing systemic change.
Read MoreThroughout our partnership with Inclusion as Prevention we’ve engaged with 98 young people to design and improve services, and early intervention for young people with experience of the justice system. It is estimated that a further 300 also participated through surveys and attending workshops. We’ve tackled challenges, overcome barriers, and learned together as a team to understand the system in South Lanarkshire, to ensure young people aren’t just supported when they enter the justice system, but that the services are there to prevent them from doing so.
Read MoreOver the last five years we have been working to change the systems of support for young people who come into conflict with law in Scotland. We’ve been doing that through co-production with young people to re-imagine the kinds of supports that help keep them included in their communities and in the supports on offer to them. Too often young people are excluded from systems of support when they come into conflict with the law. This project fundamentally reframes the work of prevention and early intervention to be young-person centred and inclusive of their diverse experiences and needs.
Read MoreWhen I first entered the Inclusion As Prevention project, I thought I would approach it as I would working with any client seeking animation support. The brief was an exciting one, working with an innovative, community-driven project that seeks to support young voices through co-design and produce an animation to educate young people and their families on the topic of domestic abuse and gender-based violence.
Read MoreIn January 2021, we were funded by Catalyst and The National Lottery Community Fund COVID-19 Digital Reponse to run a 12-week research and design project focused on reaching families remotely, in partnership with five charity partners from across the country. The whole research and design process culminated in the ‘9 steps for reaching families remotely’ - services and practitioners struggling to reach and engage with digitally excluded people.
Read MoreDuring the Connecting Families project - Funded by Catalyst and The National Lottery Community Fund COVID-19 Digital Reponse, and supported by Design agency Shift - we’ll be following a specific Design Process. This is broken into five key phases. These sprint notes will reflect on our learning from each phase. This blog is all about the sprint 'Wrap-Up' phase.
Read MoreDuring the Connecting Families project - Funded by Catalyst and The National Lottery Community Fund COVID-19 Digital Reponse, and supported by Design agency Shift - we’ll be following a specific Design Process. This is broken into five key phases. These sprint notes will reflect on our learning from each phase. This blog is all about the sprint 'Develop' phase.
Read MoreDuring the Connecting Families project - Funded by Catalyst and The National Lottery Community Fund COVID-19 Digital Reponse, and supported by Design agency Shift - we’ll be following a specific Design Process. This is broken into five key phases. These sprint notes will reflect on our learning from each phase. This blog is all about the mid-sprint 'Develop' phase.
Read MoreDuring the Connecting Families project - Funded by Catalyst and The National Lottery Community Fund COVID-19 Digital Reponse, and supported by Design agency Shift - we’ll be following a specific Design Process. This is broken into five key phases. These sprint notes will reflect on our learning from each phase. This blog is all about the 'Define' phase.
Read MoreDuring the Connecting Families project - Funded by Catalyst and The National Lottery Community Fund COVID-19 Digital Reponse, and supported by Design agency Shift - we’ll be following a specific Design Process. This is broken into five key phases. These sprint notes will reflect on our learning from each phase. This blog is all about the 'Discover' phase.
Read MoreDuring the Connecting Families project - Funded by Catalyst and The National Lottery Community Fund COVID-19 Digital Response, and supported by Design agency Shift - we’ll be following a specific Design Process. This is broken into five key phases. These sprint notes will reflect on our learning from each phase. This blog is all about the 'Inception' phase.
Read MoreWith 71% of community organisations in some parts of the voluntary sector having moved to online delivery since the COVID-19 crisis began, digital exclusion has become an even bigger obstacle to engaging those most in need than it was before. This is a particularly pressing issue for Early Years services, who support many families living in financially vulnerable households without internet access. As England endures another lockdown, Dartington Service Design Lab [Dartington] is working with a number of charities and families to develop and test different ways of supporting early years services to reach digitally excluded families. Here’s how we intend to do it...t ways of supporting early years services to reach digitally excluded families. Here’s how we intend to do it...
Read MoreWe talk about evidence a lot at Dartington, and using evidence ‘in new ways’. We try to put this in practical terms without too much jargon, but we know it still sounds pretty abstract. What do we actually mean? Our new report tries to bring it all down to earth.
Read MoreAt Dartington, we have been working with Salford Council to develop a systemic Theory of Change for their Better Outcomes New Delivery (BOND) programme. In the course of the work with managers and practitioners from across the BOND programme, we discovered that family resilience was felt to be central to all the programmes – but also under-explored. What did it look like, and how could it be supported? We worked with teams to create a testable model of the dynamic causes of family resilience to underpin and inform subsequent work within the systemic theory of change for all BOND programmes. Here’s what we learnt...
Read MoreThis year, youth services faced new challenges in engaging young people, particularly young people at risk of becoming involved in violence. As the Learning Partner for the Youth Endowment Fund’s special COVID-19 Grant round, we’ve had the opportunity to understand more about how organisations – ranging from grassroots charities to Britain’s largest local authorities – have managed to adapt programmes to continue to engage young people during the pandemic. In this blog, we look at how working with parents, carers and siblings can help organisations to maintain positive relationships with young people through the rest of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Read MoreAfter almost a year of directly engaging with young people from various care settings, we identified the communication needs of individuals and the system-wide needs of practitioners and carers responsible for delivering care within the council. We found that it was important to support ‘meaningful communications’ between young people, practitioners, parents, and caregivers, which formed the basis of the design stages of our work.
Read MoreThe Dartington Service Design Lab joins the Centre for Youth Impact, Research in Practice and the University of Plymouth to form the Learning Partnership for the new Youth Endowment Fund COVID-19 Grant Round. We will focus on understanding the impact of COVID-19 on young people at risk of being drawn into violent crime, and the most effective approaches to reaching, engaging and serving vulnerable young people during the pandemic.
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